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Living with Nicola’s Single Life
by Jed Lipinski 06/01/2007Neighborhood: East Village
Nicola is a lively twenty-year-old girl of Thai and Italian descent, born and raised on the Upper East Side. She has been my roommate on East 4th Street for four months, since I answered her apartment ad on Craigslist, and she works as a cocktail waitress at Thor—a fashionable nightclub in the Lower East Side—until [...]
What I Heard On The W Train
by Mickey Z. 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Midtown
I’m standing on the crowded Lexington Avenue subway platform, waiting for either the N or W Train to take me off the island of Manhattan. A drone-like female voice booms over the loudspeaker: “Ladies and Gentlemen, pan-handling is against the law. Please do not give to law-breakers. Please give instead to charities that support those [...]
No Privacy in the Community House Community
by Kathryn Holmquist 12/31/2006Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Park Slope
“The intersection of Fifth Avenue and Union Street is the unofficial town square of Park Slope, a bustling baby factory where expensive puppies idle beside a store that sells $28 Brooklyn T-Shirts and a wine shop called Red, White & Bubbly.” Fifth Avenue and Union Street is also the intersection where, in 1973, Raphi Allini, [...]
Dom’s Wife
by Mickey Z. 11/24/2006Neighborhood: Astoria, Queens
When you live in an apartment building, you never know who the hell is gonna move in next door. I remember being in my late teens when a Greek family moved out two doors down and an older couple took the apartment. The guy’s name was Dom and he fixed televisions for a living. A [...]
The Blind Leading The Blind: In the Dark ’77
by Michele Hush 11/10/2006Neighborhood: East Village
Four of us had gathered for dinner in a room above a popular bar on University Place on a swampy and airless Manhattan night. We were all twentysomething professionals, friends from the business side of the music business. Hannah worked for a British artist management firm, and Dina managed PR for a small American record [...]
What My Daughter Heard On The Balcony
by Yuliya Chernova 10/24/2006Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Outer Boroughs
After my daughter was born, I spent part of each day on the balcony of our third-floor apartment in Sheepshead Bay, rocking her in her stroller. Even when chilly, we’d sit out. Just like her mama and papa when they were little in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sasha has spent much of her first year wrapped [...]
I Lose My Cherry
by Thomas R. Ziegler 08/10/2006Neighborhood: East Harlem
It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday in April 1973, and my first-day tour on the job, when that seminal alarm sounds. The disembodied voice of the dispatcher booms from loudspeakers throughout the firehouse, “Attention the following units…Engines 83, 60, 41-1 Ladders 29, 17-2 Battalion 14…Respond to…” The box number and address are given, and then the [...]
The Cry of the Water Wolf
by Tony Antoniadis 07/06/2006Neighborhood: Brooklyn, Williamsburg
Last July, a friend of mine called to tip me off about an upcoming water gun assassination tournament. I was swamped at work when he called, crimping duvets for a big Neiman Marcus order—but seconds later I was on the tournament’s website, reading the requirements for entry. By midnight I was in the back of [...]
Bonfire of the Remedies
by Andy Christie 06/28/2006Neighborhood: Clinton
My mother’s narrow little medicine chest is a joke to her. It’s quaint. It’s for amateurs. She keeps her medicine in the kitchen cabinet and the kitchen drawers and the candy dishes. Her canisters for coffee and flour and sugar are filled with Lipitor and Propranalol and Prozac. She could collapse from overmedication at any [...]
Men Threw Balls To One End, Then Back Again: Scientology
by Kurt Rademacher 06/15/2006Neighborhood: Clinton
Jake’s girlfriend broke up with him, so he started driving and turned up eleven hours later at my apartment. We were the kind of friends who’d been close once but who didn’t speak often anymore, owing not to any particular falling out, but to the passage of time and a mutual inability to put any [...]
Bank Robber
by Thomas Beller 05/31/2006Neighborhood: Upper West Side
The Joan of Arc Junior High school had just let out across the street and a crowd gathered right away. The man in the headlock, the captured man, was impossibly skinny, and wore faded jeans that were a bit too short, and sneakers. He had a beard and shaggy brown hair. He could have been [...]
Twilight in the Toy Shop
by Christine Nieland 02/22/2006Neighborhood: West Village
I’d dashed in about a half-hour before closing time. This little toy store in the Village, whose shelves cheerfully overflow with cute wooden toys in primary colors, funny stuffed monkeys and bright plastic puzzles. A friendly, crowded little place devoid of Gameboys and electronic pinging, the kind of place where you can reassure yourself you’re [...]
